GAME Australia Lays Off 281 Employees, Closes 60 Stores 
How Diablo III's Always-On Internet Requirement Makes It A Better Game GAME: No Buyers Yet, Crisis To Drag On For Another Month 
Have Your Say On Video Game Pricing 
35,000 Telstra Passwords Reset After Games Services Hacked 
Dragon's Dogma: The Kotaku Review This time from QuakeCon. Runs for about six minutes, which is more than enough time to convince me that I’m going to need to play this with the lights on.
Sure, the supply of the Wii in Japan may be stabilising, but what about its demand?. Last week’s charts saw it drop from 109,854 to 86,786. This week it’s down to 77,169. Could Japan’s love affair with the Wii be coming to an end? And could its former love, the PlayStation, be back in the frame? The PS3 shifted 28,829 units last week, more than double its sales from the week before. Crazy days in Nippon.
Full stats after the jump:
So there are two kinds of 360 on the market. There are the ones without the new heatsink. These have a tendency to…die horribly. And there are those with the new heatsink, which seem to work a lot better. Which one have you got? Ben Heck can help you, with his highly scientific methodology. First, get a camera. Then put your camera on top of an overturned 360. Then take a picture. If you can see your DVD drive, you’re fresh outta luck. If you can’t see it, you’ve got a new heatsink in there and your luck reserves are in good shape. See if you have the new Xbox 360 heatsink without voiding the precious warranty [Ben Heck]
Take-Two, this just isn’t your day. Or year. Despite having the very best intentions with their All-Pro Football 2K8 game (namely giving Madden some, any, competition), things haven’t gone too well. Yeah, it looks like the same old NFL2K game, but without NFL teams it’s all fallen a little flat. Like, nobody’s buying it. Prompting CEO and President Ben Feder to state during a conference call today that: We’re not terribly pleased and not disappointed. We’re watching closely and are going to react proactively when Madden comes out. We know we’re in competition with them.
You keep at em, Ben! I don’t like your chances of taking on the combined might of EA Sports AND the NFL licence with a bunch of retired players on made-up teams, but hey. Keep at em. Take-Two Conference Call [Take-Two]
You work on a fancy new game, you need a fancy new site. Like Fallout 3′s new digs. Not much there at the moment aside from your usual wallpapers, positive-press roundups and a glimpse of the dev team’s working conditions (above), but there is a heart-warmingly humble diary post from Bethesda’s Todd Howard for you to read. Dude nearly bends back over himself in reverence to the original Fallout, which is always nice. He even posts highlights from Interplay’s original “Fallout Vision Statement”, which they’ve been consulting throughout development of Fallout 3. Good reading. Welcome Back to Fallout [Fallout 3 Official Site]
id and Valve aren’t enemies. In fact, Next-Gen seem to think they’re soon to be the very bestest of friends! They’ve heard whispers that at some stage during QuakeCon id will be announcing that they’ll be distributing their games over Steam. Which games? Who knows, but I wouldn’t mind giving Heretic one more spin. Just for old times’ sake. Rumour: id Getting Steamy? [Next-Gen]
This is it. The first discussion meeting for Game Club’s Mr. Robot.
If you haven’t been following along we’ve decided to play through the indie PC game Mr. Robot as a group. To join in you can either try to enter our campfire or just hit the jump and follow along with the discussion going on in there. We will be updating this post as the discussion unfolds. Feel free to talk about the game in the comments, but please try to keep to the rules.
Which are these:
Once in the room, I think I’m going to use another IM system to let people IM me to either raise their hands, digitally speaking. I’ll tell people in the IM when they can talk in the campfire room. The idea here is that we don’t want a few dozen people all trying to talk about the game at the same time. So, I hope we can get someone to ask an intelligent question and then take turns discussing it. Remember this is a work in progress so we’ll make tweaks to the mechanics of how this works as we proceed.
A cardinal rule will be that there will be no off-topic talking, no trolling, no flame wars, no fan-boyism in the campfire chat or the person will be kicked out. We’re all intelligent people, I don’t see why we can’t act like we are when gathered together online.
In general the idea is for people to discuss the current video game in a thoughtful and meaningful way. Why we won’t totally disallow discussion of things like graphics and play mechanics, those particular topics should really be brought up in a way that addresses the deeper meaning and ideas presented in the game.
Hit the jump for the discussion and the link to join the campfire group.
I must say. That authoritarian one? Looks mighty tempting. SimCity’s always had a lot of things, but fear of the state amongst your people has never been one of them. Time for that to change.
The Wrath of the Lich King cat’s a little further out of its bad today, with a bunch of patents turning up on the United States Patent and Trademark Office registry. On July 28, Blizzard filed three patents. One covers the name of the expansion itself. The others? Oh, all kinds of crap/merch. Seems Blizzard are keen on official Wrath of the Lich King mousepads, comic books, strategy guides, trading cards, colouring books, adhesive stickers, rub-on transfers, notebooks, stationery-type portfolios, posters, greeting cards, calendars, photographs and art prints. Sorry guys. No tablecloths. Maybe next expansion. Wrath of the Lich King [United States Patent and Trademark Office]
The official site for Konami’s boob-filled Gradius-esque arcade shmup has been recently updated, revealing Otomedius‘ third playable character, one that is distressingly boob-free. Emon-5 joins the pink and blue haired maidens of Otomedius for what appears to be some very relaxed shooting. New gameplay movies have been added to the site, but they’re of the popular postage-stamp size that Japanese corporations are so unusually obsessed with.
A brief update, yes, and disheartening in its lack of anime girl cleavage. Note that Konami promises more updates “comming soon” so keep your eyes peeled and huggable pillows within easy humping distance.
Otomedius Official Site [Konami.jp]
